Good morning, everyone.
We currently run two programs that serve the Lower Mainland but focus on different communities. We are servicing Surrey, which is the highest-growing city in Vancouver, as well as Maple Ridge.
We want to be more solution-based. In terms of the demographics we service, we see a lot of mental health issues, people recovering from drugs and alcohol, homelessness, and the cycle of families remaining in poverty. Our programs bring things back to basics. We try to service the emotional, physical, and mental needs of an individual, so all the programs are customized to address their particular situation. We try to build them up, and build up their self-esteem and self-confidence. We find that once we can build that strong relationship, we can move forward in implementing their work experience and knowledge and can deal with the soft skills, so when they go into a job, if somebody upsets them, they can go into conflict resolution.
All our programs have them leave with a tool box that they can go back and dig into so they can address situational things that happen at work. We find that the 24-hour mentorship we provide is probably the key to the success of these programs. Needs and issues don't stop at 5 o'clock. Right now, because of limited resources, it's Orville and I who capture what happens to them after they leave work or after our office is closed. There is an emergency number that ties directly to us, so there's continual 24-hour support.
It's very challenging to deal with the youth we deal with, because we are trying to undo 19 or 20 years of habit, as well as cultural, historical, and family cycles and issues, and we are trying to undo those in 17 weeks. We actually started this out of our basement. In the first program we were blessed with, through Service Canada, they allowed us to work with the youth for six months. As we transitioned, it just kept getting shorter and shorter, so our limit to try to address the issues started to become really challenging. More time....
We encourage community involvement. It takes a village to raise a child, so that's the mantra we hang on to as an organization. We can't make one individual perfect, so we need the help of the government. We need the help of employers who are willing to give these youth a chance, a foot in the door, just so they can expand and grow.
One of the things we just handed in is a program that we want to start, which is opening a thrift store. It's addressing sustainability for our organization. It's kind of like a workplace learning centre. Instead of getting them out right away after five weeks of being in class, we are going to keep them for another five weeks so that we can address the workplace issues they have. Our staff will be there to watch and monitor how they work and their work ethic. We want to make them as perfect as possible as employees, and then we go out into the workforce and get the community involved with different employers.
The issue we really find prevalent is mental health. If we can get more services dealing with mental health.... That seems to be the key factor in people progressing and choosing other options to try to figure out how they are going to deal with poverty. We have a good number of youth who steal, because they don't have food to eat.
They try to go into survival mode. Eating is a basic need, and again we try to address that by having an in-house food bank. If any youth walks by and looks hungry, or we see that they have a need, then we provide food for them; they don't even have to be in our program. It's been challenging to help them, to funnel them back into the bigger food banks, because food's very scarce. People aren't donating to the food banks the way they used to, so we try to address that in house, and we try to give them clothing too. We do drives to get interview clothing and clothing just for day to day.
As you can see, all our programs just address basic needs, and so it's a holistic approach. It's bringing it back to basics, really, but if we can get more mental health supports.... We as an organization don't have the finances or the ability to hire psychologists and stuff like that, so we use our community to help address that, but it's getting limited. We have kids who want to commit suicide, but they call the hotline and they're put on hold, or they have to wait three weeks before they see a mental health worker.